Call It Sleep, novel by Henry Roth, published in 1934. It centres on the character and perceptions of a young boy, the son of Yiddish-speaking Jewish immigrants in a ghetto in New York City. Roth uses stream-of-consciousness techniques to trace the boy’s psychological development and to explore his perceptions of his family and of the larger world around him. The book powerfully evokes the terrors and anxieties the child experiences in his anguished relations with his father and realistically describes the squalid urban environment in which the family lives.

The novel was rediscovered in the late 1950s and early ’60s and came to be viewed both as an important proletarian novel of the 1930s and as a classic of Jewish American literature.

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Feb. 8, 1906 Tysmenica, Galicia, Austria-Hungary [now in Ukraine] Oct. 13, 1995 Albuquerque, N.M., U.S. American teacher, farmer, machinist, and sporadic author whose novel Call It Sleep (1934) was one of the neglected masterpieces of American literature in the 1930s.

one of the many Germanic languages that form a branch of the Indo-European language family. Yiddish is the language of the Ashkenazim, central and eastern European Jews and their descendants. Written in the Hebrew alphabet, it became one of the world’s most widespread languages, appearing in...

narrative technique in nondramatic fiction intended to render the flow of myriad impressions—visual, auditory, physical, associative, and subliminal—that impinge on the consciousness of an individual and form part of his awareness along with the trend of his rational thoughts. The...